The Question of Digital Responsibility: An Ethnography of Emergent Institutional Formations in the Contemporary Governance of Technology

Abstract

In recent years, the social and societal expectation of “responsible digitalization” seems only to have become more pronounced. This development has occurred in tandem with regulatory and other institutional initiatives aimed at governing digitalization, yet from a social scientific stand-point relatively little is known about the particular way(s) in which “digital responsibility” be-comes institutionalized in practice. In this thesis, I present the first long-term empirical (ethno-graphic) exploration of such processes in the context of two Danish organizations working on technological governance. The purpose of this investigation is twofold: 1) it allows me to chal-lenge certain tenets of the emergent literature on “corporate digital responsibility” (CDR) based on insights obtained in the field; and 2) it inspires the development of an analytical framework geared at analyzing processes of institutionalization starting from a particular concept of socio-symbolic performativity.